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Showing posts from February, 2010

Teh original legendary one man army animator: Bill Plympton

Ya know before us 3d d00ds started messing with making one man 3d animated features Bill Plympton had already done like 6 hand drawn features on his own... He is HARDCORE... I've been a fan of his stuff ever since I went to my first Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted festival of animation... He's an inspiration.... from 6am to 8pm he's animating every day ^ ^ Check out this great 2 part interview with him.

Deep Focus

As I'm always afraid of losing focus and getting behind on my film work I tend to like focus too hard for too long which like beats on your mind and body... I went to the hospital this week for the first time in ten years as I was feeling fail and the bags under my eyes were getting worse instead of better... I did tests and all that but haven't heard back from the Dr. d00d yet even though I got the test results emailed too me... most everything seems pretty normal to my undoctored eyes... but yeah since most all of the people I've come across in my life who wanted to make they own films usually lost focus or got caught in other stuff I'm like paranoid about doing that myself.... so I focus too hard for too long... I overcompensate...lest I become the thing I fear even when by now I know I can focus haha.....when I go to sleep the last thing I do is make sure all the computers are rendering and the first thing I do is check render progress 0_0 I dont go out much and I

Apparently WE are not included in the "future of filmmaking"

So as an all around animation/film/everything geek... I try to follow whats going on in the film biz etc... Now with Pocahontas in Blue making all the money in the world and with Spielberg making "Tintin" with the same "revolutionary" technology those dinosaurs and they cronies are hailing 3d mocap technology "the future of filmmaking" Ok so this is the future here... Does anyone else not find this shit totally ridiculous?!? ^ ^ Ok so you get real living human actors to put on these awkward gangly suits, with markers all over they faces to dance around as you wave sticks at them and shit? AND this is done because it gives the director more control? Because you could just have animators keyframe animate the stuff? OH but I see that takes the CONTROL away from the DIRECTORS.... Now you and I as independent animators... lets get with the future! Ok let me get a million dollars for the gear...ok ok let me rent a warehouse to haus all this crap... let me

Do what you fear ( in art ^_^ )

As I'm working on this film in which everything is 3d I often wonder why I didn't get into doing this way sooner?! Why did I do all that ridiculous stuff to get a stopmotion character into a 3d set?! Why would I get scurred and do cutout animation in 3d?! Its so much easier/flexible..works and looks so much better in 3d.... its because I was afraid 0_0 Coming from stopmotion where you do thangs with yer fingers like SNAP YO FINGAZ I was acting like a BIA BIA because 3d wasn't that comfortable ^ ^ So I was afraid of it... now after going through teh struggles to get like full 3d powerS like I does now... looking back it wasn't that hard... the key to learning is to not be in a rush and not be afraid... I didn't try to "seriously" learn 3d until I was already making wats so I was in a rush and afraid because of deadlines etc... In between films I had time to experiment and learn and WAS IT WORTH IT!! So if your having a hard time learning something new...

Some rant about making animated films + 0_o

- That it should be a good "film", period... animation just happens to be the medium your using... If you look at teh Pixar films... they are good films that happen to be animated... I'm sure theY teamS could do the same thing in live action except it would be a little creepier ^ ^ thats not a bad thing... - Making a good film on your own is a lot less pressure than making an "animated" film on your own... because when we think "animated" that usually means everything is animated all the time but that doesn't necessarily make something better or worse... I'm of the school of film thought that characters should speak and move only when they have something to say or do... all the superfluous animation in all of the non-Pixar 3d features annoys me so much that I haven't been able to sit through ANY ^ ^ Its like "LOOK AT ME I'M SO ANIMATED BECAUSE I'M ANIMATION KIDS" Oh there's the thing! Its for kids right... or the &

Tech notes and stuff for Feb 010

I'm animating the first scene with like fields of dynamic grass now... I'm using C4d's awesome hair module... To make the grass like blow in the wind realistically I just added a wind object with a lil xpresso to vary the speed since I'm in R11 in R11.5 the wind object has a turbulence parameter that does this for you... I have characters walking through the grass SO you would think I would want to put hair collision detection of the characters right? I did some tests and the faster and actually better looking thing to do is to attach a turbulence object to the character down near they feet so when they walk through the grass it throws the grass around nicely... when using collision detection it was accurate I guess but not that interesting looking... I've found that when doing tests comps in After Effects CS4 in 32bit with 1920x802 exr sequence material its really SLOW... I'm using a decent i7 920 system OC'ed to 3.4ghz with 8gb ram and its still slow...

The fear of FAIL

Today when all FAIL_yers are magnified over 9000 times it makes it a little scary to... TRY... to TRY anything because YOU MIGHT FAIL!?!? Omg!??!  But to do something WIN you usually have to try... actually you need to go all out and do your best... which might cause you to make a few mistakes... mistakes which might be interpreted as FAIL... BUT its not... the only way to truly FAIL at life is too not try at all... but to only stand on the sidelines out of fear as life passes you by... now your going to die... you didn't fail but you didn't live either...oops! Wasn't that the point of "life"? TO Live?! OOOPS! This quote has always kept me going... To sing a wrong note is insignificant, but to sing without passion is unforgivable. ~Beethoven

Where am I? Here I am? Where am I going?

Those are the questions you must always ask yourself when in production... I'm constantly recalculating my quota's so I know exactly where I am in production... like I know this month I only have to do 4.8 shots/day to do this months work... It takes a little time but it removes the panic/insane sense of fear and urgency you get if you don't really know where you are with deadlines looming... I updated the above image with the vertical purple lines which have the # of shots in that sequence so at a glance I can see where most of the shots congregate and also with the colors where the difficult sequences are... Hmmm I wonder why I'm planning to finish before October? ^ ^ Anyway I spent most of the night doing R&D trying to do poor mans volumetric ground fog for this shot... There's no FumeFx plug for c4d... I think 3 diff liquid plugs came out recently but they are either mega expensive or they have horrible UI's so I came up with my own using the Mograph

Some new music madness "M" 2010

Just finished a new album full of madness... it features all the audio from "FACE" too if you wanna scare yerself with that ^ ^ Link below... M dot Strange "M" 2010 

When will HUMAN creativity catch up with technology?

So as you may not know... before I lost all my friends and go into animation I used to make live action films... WEIRD ONES ^ ^ Well I remember back then everyone, including me had this video complex... because if you didn't have the money (like $50,000) to shoot on film you shot on video and for the most part it looked "cheap" Fast forward to today and with Canon's launch of this new $800 DSLR that shoots BEAUTIFUL "filmic" images IF you know what yer doing and have some tite lenses... there is no more video complex... Pair that with a Zoom H2 and you can do sync sounds in surround ^ ^ I own the Zoom and its great... so yeh for less than $1000 you got awesome looking images and surround sound... well actually we've had some pretty awesome cheap tech for a few years now... BUT WHO IS USING IT TO ITS FULLEST POTENTIAL?! From my perspective the technology has moved light years ahead of human creativity when it comes to art, film, animation etc... MA

The fear of being forgotten

Today in the internetS world of 80 jabillion things to see and 100 jabillion people screaming crazy thangs with they faces painted with pudding vying for a persons attention its like kinda hard to be remembered eh? If your some secret international assassin er something its great... but if your a filmmaker/musician creative person its like teh worst nightmare to be forgotten... you want people to tell other people about your stuff and hopefully come back for more... and if they forgot about you it aint gonna happen! SO how to be remembered?? Hmmm well the way I look at it is kinda like this... art is a conversation... you can choose to talk about the weather like many people do in life and in art ^ ^ Oscar Wilde said "Talk of the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative" er something like that... So just like many conversations about the weather with people you have forgotten if your art never goes outside the boundaries of "normal, acceptable" material yo

I like dis guy ScreamerClauz ^ ^

So this d00d messaged me this week about doin teh voices in HSM and attached a new animated short that he did... he did the voice of this dog that eats a fetus out of a pregnant woman then bites the penis off of a man that says "What are you a fag?!?!" hahaha and it was one of the most disturbing fictional WIN things I have seen in a long time ^ ^ I like evil stuff myself... I'm one of those people that WANTS to live in Silent Hill haha...I liek things that you think teh DEVIL could have possibly been executive producer on haha and this d00d's stuff is like that... Here's a trailer he posted recently.. His stuff is super creative, different and creepy as fawK... which is definitely in the minority when it comes to 3d animation.... so I look forward to seeing more madness from you weirdo's out there! ^_^ Props to ScreamerClauz for keepin it craZY AS FAWK!